The Gendered Effect of Disasters on Mental Health: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Disasters produce or exacerbate mental health problems. While women and men generally experience different rates of mental illness, there have been few attempts to synthesize the literature on the gendered impacts of disaster on mental health. Our strategy was to first conduct a Google Scholar search for articles containing the words “trauma,” “gender,” and “disaster.” We then searched all 1990–2020 issues of journals germane to this topic. These combined searches yielded 167 articles, of which 34 met our inclusion criteria. We reviewed the findings of these articles within three categories: natural disaster, human-induced disaster, and disaster results in displacement/relocation. We observed three trends: 1) women and men report similar levels of mental health difficulties after human-induced disasters; 2) women report more mental health problems than men in developed countries following a natural disaster; 3) displaced women report more mental health problems than displaced men.